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BBC Provides More Detail on a Report It Didn’t Show

LONDON, March 4 — Senior government officials rallied Sunday to support a High Court ruling forbidding the BBC, Britain’s public service broadcaster, from transmitting news about accusations of campaign finance improprieties that are under investigation by the police.

But the BBC nudged its reporting a little further forward, saying that the report it had planned to broadcast related to an e-mail message between two close confidants of Prime Minister Tony Blair. The details of the message, the BBC said on its Web site (www.bbc.co.uk), “could have been central to the investigation into an alleged Downing Street cover-up” over the financing scandal.

For the past year, the police have been investigating accusations by some Welsh and Scottish politicians that major political parties traded seats in the House of Lords for donations and loans. The accusations have focused most recently on Mr. Blair’s Labor Party during the period when it sought to raise money during the 2005 general election, which it won with a reduced majority.

More recently, however, the police inquiry has shifted to embrace suspicions that some figures in Mr. Blair’s entourage may, in British legal parlance, have sought to pervert the course of justice, meaning a cover-up.

On Friday, Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, applied to the High Court to prevent the BBC from broadcasting its news item, saying police investigators believed that their inquiry would be jeopardized if the story were made public. The court issued the injunction.

The BBC argued that its story concerned a “legitimate matter of public interest.”

The conflict is familiar in Britain, where a range of laws forbid the publication of material deemed prejudicial to pending court cases. In several major terrorism trials, judges have imposed sweeping restrictions on testimony so that it becomes public only after verdicts are announced.

Under British law, reporting restrictions are routinely imposed when charges are brought in order to avoid affecting the outcome of subsequent trials. Last month, when counterterrorism police raided homes in Birmingham, in central England, the police urged the news media to restrict their reporting of the event.

Most legal hearings, however, may be freely reported once the proceedings have started. Indeed, in a current trial of six men accused of plotting to bomb the London transit system on July 21, 2005 — two weeks after the London bombings when four suicide bombers killed 52 victims — prosecution evidence showing videotape of the suspects’ movements was released by the police once it had been seen by the jury.

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The attorney general’s move drew support from government ministers like John Hutton, the work and pensions secretary, who told a BBC Sunday morning talk show: “The attorney general has not acted against the BBC. The attorney general went to court, and the judge decided there should be an injunction. This has been proper due process.”

The incident has nonetheless inspired renewed attention on the possible outcome of the campaign finance accusations at a time when Mr. Blair is mulling over when to leave office.

He has been interviewed twice by the police investigating the case. While he has been described by the police as a witness, some of his closest aides — including his chief fund-raiser, Lord Levy, and a senior official in his office, Ruth Turner — have been arrested, though they are not being held in prison.

The supposed scandal has formed a dark political shadow at a time when Mr. Blair is seeking to create a legacy. Last fall, he said he would quit within a year, but he has not said precisely when.

In an article published Sunday, Mr. Blair voiced concern about the repercussions of his announced departure.

“It wasn’t really my desire last year to have a situation where all this uncertainty was created,” he told The Observer, a Sunday newspaper. “There is always a debate about whether I was sensible to say I wouldn’t fight a fourth election — though personally I think I’d have had a load of different problems if I hadn’t.”

He compared his planned departure with the ouster of the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher in 1990, when her party turned against her. “Mrs. Thatcher kept saying she was going on and on because people kept asking her,” Mr. Blair said, “and in the end she got absolutely belted and chucked out.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: BBC Provides More Detail On a Report It Didn’t Show. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe